Experimental food artistes Bompas and Parr are offering a workshop teaching London punters to concoct bitters containing real human tears. Music and candles will be provided to make participants sad or wistful – whatever it takes – and then the resulting tears will be blended with neutral alcohol and various herbs to create the perfect Christmas gift for an acquaintance you wish to frighten. Bitter Tears is just the latest comestible to be made from human excretions of one sort or another. The list is almost long enough to constitute a menu …
Bleak Manhattan
Unique cocktail containing fat tears of regret, recrimination, distress or possibly eye irritation. But not joy. That wouldn’t work at all.
Beard beer
American Ale with just a hint of beard. For reasons that may strike you as obscure, or at least insufficient, the Rogue Brewery in Oregon has chosen to produce a beer made with wild yeast harvested from the bushy beard of its chief brewer. This isn’t quite as odd as it sounds: by spending so much time in a brewery, the beard had become a repository for all sorts of yeasts (it was also full of the ordinary brewer’s yeast they use), but their lab was lucky to isolate a wild strain that actually made decent beer. Or so they say. And you thought you didn’t want to know how sausages were made.
Yeast infection bread
This is almost exactly as odd as it sounds. Feminist blogger Zoe Stavri recently posted about her efforts to make sourdough bread containing yeast from an infection she happened to be harbouring at the time. Stavri was upfront about the fact that the candida albicans she retrieved (with a dildo, if you want the recipe) probably wouldn’t make an effective raising agent, and that the surprising success of her sourdough was likely down to other wild yeasts already present in the flour.
Creme caramel avec semence
The cover of the book Natural Harvest: A Collection of Semen-based Recipes has something that looks like creme caramel on its cover, but I didn’t read further so I’m not sure how much semen is in it. Still, the reader reviews on Amazon are definitely worth a look (“My Spotted Dick has never been so popular,” etc).
Breast milk ice-cream
Ice-cream made from fresh donated breast milk blended with Madagascan vanilla and lemon zest. First introduced in 2011 as a PR collaboration between an ice-cream company and a breastfeeding campaigner, this human-based comestible now seems to belong to a simpler time, when people occasionally ate placenta or drank their own urine, and long before anyone tried to sell us back our own tears as a cocktail ingredient. It was also £14 a tub.
